Older blog entries for avriettea (starting at number 55)

I've been somewhat busy and not had a chance to get through the stuff that's been piling up in a vim scratch pad for me in the last few days. Pardon the shotgun weblog entry.

The Wikipedia: The deeper I dig, the worse it gets. It's kind of a festering pile. The first problem is that when you look at it from a systems engineering standpoint, you see a system that cannot scale, and you see very few "old hands" behind it, guiding it forwards. I tried to see if we might be looking at a PHP scaling problem, and ran across this article. Ugh. ORA really will publish anything, won't they? The article, aside from not answering the question of whether PHP can scale, serves to further muddy the question by making comparisons to Java. The article is completely worthless. The author, when confronted with this, more or less agreed and said that I'd missed the point. He wanted to point out that PHP sucked just as much as Java.

Moving right along, I've also been dealing with some of the content of the wikipedia. I don't recall exactly how I came across it, but I found the node for The Care Bears. Ok, granted, they deserve an entry. But, does every fucking bear need its own node?

Give me a fucking break. I am actually going to be spending at least several hours cleaning up the garbage content of some assflower, whose contributions are at best dubious, and whose intellectual capacity is, at best limited:

Right now I'm reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and I don't get why the guy is supposed to be this huge hero because nobody likes him and he doesn't care. I don't think that makes him a hero. I think that makes him disagreeable. If he had any heroic qualities and nobody liked him and he didn't care, then he would be a hero, but he's not. I guess I'm just one of the mindless mass who doesn't understand or appreciate Objectivism. Or maybe I just don't like Howard Roark.

I'm also incredibly disappointed at the large amount of star trek fancruft is enshrined on the wikipedia. I could understand perhaps a page on The Trill. But a separate page for Ezri Dax and Jadzia Dax (and no, I haven't checked prior Daxes, but I'm sure they're all there). Not to mention all the various Klingon High Council politics and (this takes the cake) fucking redirect for ChonnaQ (Klingon for "Klingon") to [[Klingon]]. In the english wikifuckingpedia.

I find myself completely disgusted with the project. There is so much good there, and I'm with Jimbo. I want to give everyone on the planet a copy. But people in Banda Fucking Aceh don't really need articles on every minor character in Star Trek and their love interests.

So, I want to help, but I think maybe what I want to do is just take a break from contributing content to it for a little while, and go on a jihad, burning shit out of it that doesn't belong there. Maybe I'll even get a medal for it.

zhaoway, I was going to complain at you, and assert that you can't possibly mean what you said about not unit testing. However, chromatic said it for me. I take further solace in knowing that chromatic is a perl hacker. Us perl people know tests. Maybe you should spend some time writing some perl modules and contributing them to the CPAN, zhaoway. You will learn the value of unit tests.

Adium. How long are they going to keep their unstable trunk broken? I've been trying to build an Adium-svn for like two weeks now, and it still doesn't build. It's almost like they gave up on it.

Prevayler. Several people have mentioned prevayler. Reading the docs, it seems like reasonable enough stuff to me. However, I can't get past the fact that this "Klaus" person is a fucking kook, and has more of an attitude than I do. That's a project guaranteed to fail, in my book.

shlomif: Welcome to knowing Sungo. I worked with the man for a year (well, 364 days). He is a very bright and capable programmer. Sometimes he's a little difficult to work with. I think, even, the last time he and I talked on IRC he banned me. I still consider him a friend. I just accept that, like me, Sungo has some edges that are a little rougher than the rest of the population. I'm not going to get into whether I think either of you was right in that IRC exchange, but I can tell you he probably doesn't hold anything against you and would probably talk to you without issue this evening if you wanted to try. Or he might not. He isn't obligated to treat you nicely or anything. This is the internet, not group therapy. Grow a thicker skin. It will come in handy. Especially on irc.perl.org.

deekayen... I just don't know what to say to you. A well done steak, particularly a filet, is a crime against god. Anthony Bourdain, who I consider to be a personal hero, said in Kitchen Confidential:

[steaks], if ordered well done were routinely thrown into the deep-fryer until crispy, then tossed into an oven to incinerate further ...

I cannot imagine how offended your waiter and chef were by being asked to destroy a piece of beef like that.

Seared, with a cool red center, if you please. Well done? For fuck's sake. I bet you like Pilsners and drink Corona with a lime.

Today I will not complain about anybody in public.

However, while yesterday's (unfortunately somewhat harsh) entry had some technical content and probably belongs on advogato, today's is less interesting. Blame it on the joblessness.

First, I downloaded AbiWord. I haven't used it since LinuxPPC in 2000. It was kind of a novelty to me back then, and honestly struck me as something of a mess. I haven't ever used the Mac port, nor did I know it existed. I will report back what I can, when I get time to put it through its paces. I'm a programmer and a sysadmin, not a typesetting, layout kinda guy. So doing a resume is a hard thing for me to do. Which is too bad, given it is crucial to putting food on the table. But I digress. Will keep you informed, robsta.

titus, insom: I personally found Altered Carbon somewhat disturbing. I think perhaps the Sharya torture scene (or indeed the very opening scene of the book!) was what most bothered me, which is odd, given the sheer volume of violence in the book. However, upon reflection, I don't find it any less disturbing than I found Against a Dark Background or perhaps even Look to Windward.

I've noticed that I have sort of picked up a predilection for SF authors from the UK. Stross, Banks, Morgan (new), Hamilton (we shall see if he can make up for his last book with his next one), etc. This is maddening for me, as somebody from the US, as if I want to read their books when they come out, I have to damn import them. I'd really like to read The Algebraist, but I'm going to have to buy it in hardback, pay in pounds sterling, and then pay to ship it across the atlantic. That really irritates me. I don't understand how it's even legal, frankly, except that it is vaguely reminiscent of all the fuckery with zones on DVD's and the way the recording and movie industries behave.

At any rate, I am moving from Morgan onto Vinge (The Peace War), and then I will probably read Iron Sunrise, and then probably it's time to read some more Umberto Eco. Been putting that one off. Unemployment is great for providing reading time. Maybe somewhere along the line I'll get a job.

I'm still waiting for somebody to tell me that MySQL is ready for prime time.

The Great Wikipedia Crash

So it could be said that I've done some research on scaling PostgreSQL. So when I see quotes like this:

We did have one fun and exciting moment due to a MySQL bug that's bitten us before. Because the site is so large, we can't serve it from a single database server. So, we use one master server, which holds the definitive copy of the database, and several slave servers which can be used for read-only queries, like article views (most of you will be familiar with this, it's what causes the replication lag issues like new articles not showing up. But that's another story).

It doesn't really surprise me.

What does surprise me is that we're still "recovering" from the great crash. The fact that functionality is still offline (!). I could give a list of stuff that's broken, but those of us who currently contribute to the wikipedia know what is still broken, and are aware of these issues. I'm sure that people are working on them. But we've also still got hositude:

16:03 < keats> Warning:  mysql_query(): Unable to save result set in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.4/includes/Database.php on line 324


[ ... ]


16:06 < keats> re-edited, it went through this time.
16:06 < keats> so it looks like one of the db servers then is hosed?
16:06 < cesarb> keats: dunno
16:06 < keats> well, has a partial state of hosation :)
16:07 < chaper> I thought that was supposed to be "hositude".
16:07 < keats> when served by freidrich, it worked.
16:07  * keats sighs
16:07 < chaper> It's hositudinally inclined.

For almost an entire day, we had lost a day's worth of edits! I mean, what the hell kind of database loses power and in so doing loses data?

And while I really hate to chew new assholes on people, it seems to me that there was no recovery plan. This is a basic, fundamental kind of thing you need to have when you run a website... no, manage a community resource, as important and useful as the wikipedia.

I don't understand how the simple losing of power (how the colo managed to lose power with diesel backups is ALSO a mystery to me) resulted in such catastrophic failure.

1. Is MySQL such a bad product that it is incapable of ACID?
• If so, why is it still being used?
• How is it that no disaster recovery plan was in place?
  • If it's a simple matter of "because nobody had written it", can we please get around to writing it? I (or any of the other people here who work daily with databases and recovery) can help if it's needed.
• How in the hell did a colo manage to have such a spectacular power failure?

  I understand that it's difficult to run something as complex as the wikipedia, or its database, or its entire network. However, it can be done, and it is being done by organizations both commercial and non, every day. I don't think we need to hang anyone from the rafters, because, well, shit happens. But it really shouldn't happen so badly, and when it does happen, it really shouldn't take so long to unhappen.

  I think the wikimedia folks should think long and hard about (Who am I kidding, right? They've already thought long and hard about it, and their current situation reflects what they feel is the best solution) perhaps switching RDBMS's. Personally, I think Postgres might finally be up to the task, but maybe it's time to consider something commercial. Losing data is embarassing.

  I can't put up more money and buy wikimedia SSD arrays so that when the pipeline is bounced, they don't have to worry about their memcached caches being empty. I do, however, think this crash showed that there are serious problems with using it as a method of improving the speed of a site. (note to self, add [[Solid State Disk]] and put it on the [[SSD]] disambiguation page).

  I'd also like to point out that I hope this doesn't change anyone's mind about whether Google should buy, host, invest in, or otherwise involve themselves with the wikipedia.

  Lastly, I want to quote from Bryan Derkson's user page:

  David Gerard wrote:
  > Wikipedia is not primarily an experiment in Internet democracy. It's a
  > project to write an encyclopedia.
  

  This should be printed out and handed to every single person on the planet. I think I'll start a new nonprofit organzation to do that. Wikimedia will give everyone an encyclopedia. The new organization will give everyone a piece of paper explaining: it's an encyclopedia, not an experiment in democracy.

  We *are* a grand social experiment of course. But not _primarily_.

  Well said.

  --Jimbo

  I believe in the wikipedia. I really think it is an important resource, on a scale that is perhaps unprecedented. Let there be no confusion about my support of the project. If anyone can answer these questions, I'd like to hear them. If you've got a suggestion, or can donate money, please do so. At the risk of sounding sappy and/or trite, wikimedia needs us right now, in addition to our needing it.

Pardon me as I quote liberally from Altered Carbon.

The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here -- it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference -- the only difference in their eyes -- between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people, they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

Attributed to fictional character Quellcrist Falconer, in Things I Should Have Learned By Now, Volume II.

So it's a little over dramatic. We're talking about jobs, not revolutions. But, NASA is a no-go. I was a fuckup, showed up for a job interview 40 minutes late. So maybe we're feeling a little hostile and angry today.

I've also got a real case of insomnia. Ambien and I, it seems, do not agree, and I have managed to injure the holy hell out of myself stumbling and bumping into things -- and I never remember in the morning. That's a drug that scares me. And I fucking hate it when I wake up having dislocated my shoulder and covered in bruises. Ambien, no more. I may try Sonata, or maybe I can just wait out the insomnia and hope my doc will give me Provigil. Or something. Being up all night, though, I got to talk to my pal David Fetter who it turns out I sort of quasi-know from Burning Man. Small fucking planet. He's wayyyyy out on the political left, and I'm a fascist right-winger gun nut. So it was a spirited conversation with lots of cursing. Good fun when you can't sleep.

Other tasks accomplished while not sleeping, worked with Net::Amazon some. That's pretty cool. I wish they made it possible to get at things like my reviews. Then I'd be a real cool dude and I'd make an rss and everything and I'd write my advogato-to-blogger scraper and toss them reviews right in there too. But by the time I finally get all that motivation in place, and started writing code, somebody's going to give me a job. Or tell me to move. Or something.

Sandy quits her job tomorrow, and starts a new one next week. It will be pleasant having her for four days. And the new job rocks. Maybe then Fujitsu will call and tell me I need to move to Hawaii and her new job will be moot.

RIP, Hunter S. Thompson. No shame in suicide. I hope he got what he wanted.

I fucking hate software.

Let me start with memory usage. To round out the top ten, on my powerbook, with a gig of ram (which has allocated 8.9gb (!!!) of swap to defend itself):

1. Finder 1.2gb
2. firefox 678mb
3. Photoshop CS 380mb
4. "WindowServer" 332mb
5. Word 2004 314mb
6. Keynote 308mb
7. iPhoto 295mb
8. Pages 264mb
9. "ATSServer" 234mb
10. iTunes 230mb

Now, Photoshop, I expect that from. And even iPhoto -- it's got a lot of stuff to keep track of. And iTunes is playing some music (Jah Wobble incidentally), and keeping track of 11,000 tracks. But what the fuck is the finder's problem? Or firefox's? What bugs me is I could buy another gig of ram for my powerbook and I'd still be equally fucked.

Now, I'm gonna rant a little different. I got iWork 05 recently, and was thrilled to death to have Pages so I no longer have to use Word, which is slow, and hideous. I decided, being prudent and jobless, it might be a good time to update my resume. My resume has gotten kind of cluttered over the years. It's gotten me a few jobs, but it is really time to make a resume that I like. So I made one. In pages. And yay, it turned out okay in PDF too. But every fucking recruiter and HR droid on the planet wants MS Word. So, I export from Pages to Word, and get this garbage. It's totally goddamn fubar. And if I sent that to a catbert, I'd get laughed at. I certainly wouldn't get the job. And that same catbert wouldn't take a pdf. So I wasted my damn time making a resume I liked, and I suppose I'll just have to go with the resume that "seems to work" and hate it.

Some bitches better start calling me about some jobs. Real damn soon.

Ah. After Jah Wobble came Underworld. Cups is good. Will have some more of my Aberlour and perhaps drown my misery in progressive house and scotch. I'd say "fuck all y'all", but it isn't really your fault. We're all here because we like software, and want to see it suck less. I just wish we were there NOW.

Very depressed.

Getting a lotta shit done on the wikipedia, and I've even started working on the wiktionary (not really my bag, but there are a lot of articles in the wikipedia which should really be moved over; I've been doing that).

Would like to transition blog from advogato to Blogger so that I can integrate my flickr feed with it, but the guy who wrote the Net::Blogger interface didn't deign to add "date" fields to newPost(), even though Blogger supports it. And, naturally, like all of the goddamn cpan (besides me!) he doesn't answer his fucking email.

So maybe I write a scrape-and-post script myself. It'd be useless because of course it would be me-tailored, and I'd only use it once, and it would only be because that guy didn't write very good software. That would suck. And I'd rather read about fucking catamarans anyways.

I guess it's evident I'm in a foul mood. Fujitsu hasn't called, so we're still on hold on the whole moving to hawaii thing. I interviewed at NASA the other day, but managed, like a complete asshole, to be almost an hour late for the interview. I did pretty well on the technical part of it, but everyone was late and running around irritated that I had put my interview into the middle of their day. So I'm not crossing my fingers.

Somebody also recently asked me for my opinion on company blogging policy. I'd just like to point out this link, which I think zhaoway found first:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy

And then my friend Colin had to come along and point me at this. Ugh. I'm not the blogging posterboy. And again, I hate that word. But I do want to repeat here, what I said to him, because I do believe it is important.

it's entirely moot. think about it. regardless of whether it's free speech, or whether it's libel against the company, or divulging secrets, companies need to have policies on the subject because people are going to continue to do it. and they need to have policies that make their employees feel like they're part of a company that cares about them or they will FORCE their employees to blog negatively about them. oroboros, my friend.

And so here ends another useless rant about joblessness and weblogging and all that other drivel. I wish I had some better news to report, but I don't. Rest assured, if I hear good news from anyone, advogato will be somewhere in line to hear it.

I've never really liked Justin Frankel, but I did spend some of today reading through his weblog. While most of it is (like this weblog) just personal effluvia shat out onto a helpless internet increasingly devoid of actual content, I did find one thing that disturbed me.

It occurs to me that Mr. Frankel, with $86 Million and probably in the neighborhood of tens of thousands of shares of TWX, doesn't really have to think twice about whether he wants to work for himself or someone else. He can pick up and leave. Or, he can seed his own company, and do whatever he likes.

For the rest of us, the only solution really is self employment. Justin is right. He's more right, I think, than he thinks. What he says applies to any trade in which we take pride in our work.

Let me elaborate. (hey, I have a captive audience, right?)

As a systems administrator (which is the hat I wear today), I take pride in what I do. When I am the sole (or one of a group of) administrator of a machine, I want to do the right thing. I don't want to cut corners, implement quick fixes, or do any of the other things that generally get handed down from the pointy-hairs. At AOL there were thankfully few (well, only really one, but I'm just saying that because I'm bitter) pointy-hair types. However, in general, we are forced to subject our craft to things we feel harm it. We are forced to commit what we feel to be crimes against the craft. Be we programmers or systems administrators or database administrators.

The only answer, if I may repeat myself, is self employment.

If I may digress for a second, I recently found the 43 Things website. On that site, one of my objectives is get rich. Note what one person had to say about this objective:

...there are three easy ways to become rich. you can win the lottery you can become a smart successful criminal you can have an excellent, simple, outstanding idea and sell it.

i do not play lottery. I do not have the attitude for crime. I need an idea.

I find this frustrating. I do not have the thousands-of-options/shares. I do not have even one million dollars to seed a business. I have become a business in Virginia, and I manage to come up with a few thousand dollars a year in income for that business. But it's never enough; I am always beholden to some larger fish than myself for income. That larger fish is responsible for 80% of my creative direction in my career and thus life.

It disgusts me that it is so hard, in this free nation we live to be actually free.

In other news, I'm famous in Japan. Cool.

I suppose there's no harm in mentioning that I have again transitioned employers. Thankfully, I am not prohibited from discussing the terms of such termination this time.

I was fired by voicemail. In actuality, it was pretty funny. Never really been fired before, and certainly not by voicemail. I guess it doesn't really bother me, because I didn't really like the job anyways. Struck me as one of those half-hatched 1998 companies. In fact, I continually joked with coworkers that I was working for The Underpants Gnomes. Wage good, quality of job pretty good, but business model and company morale both scored pretty high (or is it low?) on the "wtf" meter.

So since some people are actually reading this, I'll give the details of the so called valve. I mentioned some time ago that a move to Hawaii was possibly imminent. And a move which would result in my working on what is really one of the coolest telescopes on the planet (love it) with Solaris (love it) and of course, living in Hawaii (love it). I realized, as I contemplated the position, that I would probably be paid a little bit less. And we wouldn't be able to eat at places such as the excellent Ruth's Chris Steak House (there isn't one on the big island). We would be leading a seriously subdued life. And it would probably be for several years. But what we would be trading for all that decadence and consumerism would be passion. To be passionate again about one's career. Fuck yeah, man! Work on the Subaru! Watch stars! That's what the really cool shit in life is. Not writing "Metrics and Monitoring Systems." Not writing database migration procedures. Fuck all that.

So I did it. We went to Mauna Kea. We stayed in Hilo. It was cool. It was way cool. The work didn't seem like it was anything I couldn't do, just your standard Solaris shop, running on Solaris and Fujitsu hardware. The tricky part for $job[-1] is that this seemed to occur at roughly the same time as I was in the hospital with food poisoning. As it turns out, they really were happening at the same time. I was in the hospital in Virginia one day, and at Urgent Care in Hilo the next day (or a day or two later, whatever). The point was, I was deathly ill, and the only thing that kept me alive during that period was lots of MS Contin, Prednisone, and Phenergan. Sick lot of drugs, that. At any rate, there's this whole 5-hour time difference between Hawaii and Virginia, and the hotel had no internet access, so my keeping in touch with anyone back home was pretty impaired. They didn't like this, and while I did try to keep in touch, after about a week of my being "just gone and presumably sick", I think they decided to fire me (or perhaps they saw flickr and/or advogato where certain mentions of Hawaii were made).

At any rate, it's all past now. I get to find a new job. This time, one that I like, instead of just the first one to come along and put and offer under my nose. It may be the job in Hilo, in which case, I get to move, too. That's always an experience.

So the valve, folks, really amounts to just a sort of cathartic flush of the old job down some employment toilet, and the hunt again for a job with passion. That smiling geek from a few weeks back was smiling because he knew he was going to Hilo. He knew he was going to see the Subaru and the Kecks, and that there was a spark there, somewhere, in what seemed like a pretty droll career.

Lesson learned? When in doubt, flush.

note: It is kind of a shame that I don't get to work with some of the coworkers from the last job, I had gotten to like some of them. Mo and Shawn in particular. Sorry, guys.

So I just finished reading Singularity Sky (I confess I am most certainly an extropian), and decided to take a gander at the Wikipedia's coverage of Charles Stross. It turned out to be mostly useful, and as complete as can be until I finish some of his other works.

Somewhat disturbingly, I wandered across this in Mr. Stross' blog. It tells a familiar story of a person being fired for blog existance/content. Again, I'm contractually prohibited from discussing my relationship with AOL post-termination, so I won't mention any specifics that I might find familiar, and you will find said entries on advogato either edited or deleted.

It is sad that we continue to see this. If I were my current employer, and I were reading this weblog, I would wonder to myself, "gosh gee, why has alex posted these two drink recipes titled safety valve to his weblog?" Alas, I think it will become apparent in the next few days what needs to be done; the means necessary to overcome. What it takes to restore passion in a career. What is worth fighting for.

It's not position. It's not CTO. It's not HNIC. It's not owning root and all the install servers and the inventory and the keys to the datacenter. I wish that were it.

I'd say more, but instead I'll quote Mr. Stross:

As with most journals where the author thinks they have a sympathetic audience, an unsympathetic audience can find copious quantities of ammunition.

Root gets old.